Time, motion, and change are such basic philosophical concepts that we see them being considered by all philosophers throughout Western philosophical thinking. These are fundamental concepts about which philosophers theorize and they are fundamental concepts about which every DickandJane deal with constantly in their ever-day actions and thoughts.
All of these concepts are abstract ideas that are constructed of multiple metaphors resulting from literal ever-day experiences. Our society thinks of metaphors as being the venue of poets; however, metaphors are not arbitrary or culturally and historically specific. “Rather, they tend to be normal, conventional, relatively fixed and stable, non arbitrary, and widespread throughout the cultures, and languages of the world”
Most importantly we must recognize these metaphors as being abstract but also that they are grounded in specific experiences.
Philosophers have theorized as to whether time really is; is it bounded, is it continuous or divided, does it flow like a river, is time the same to everyone, and is it long or short. These are common questions for DickandJane but philosophy seems to discount most of these human quizzes as being irrelevant. Often philosophers point out paradoxes embodied within these questions.
We have a rich and diverse notion of what time is. Time is not a thing-in-itself that we conceptualize as being independent. “All of our understandings of time are relative to other concepts such as motion, space, and events …We define time by metonymy: successive iterations of a type of event stand for intervals of “time”.” Consequentially, the basic literal properties of our concept of time are consequences of properties of events: Time is directional, irreversible, segmentable, continuous, and measurable.
We do have an experience of time but that experience is always in conjunction with our real experiences of events. “It also means that our experience of time is dependent on our embodied conceptualization of time in terms of events…Experience does not always come prior to conceptualization, because conceptualization is itself embodied. Further, it means that our experience of time is grounded in other experiences, the experiences of events.”
It is virtually impossible for us to conceptualize time as a stand alone concept without metaphor. Physics defines motion, i.e. velocity, in terms of distance and time, thereby indicating motion is secondary to time and distance. However, metaphorically we appear to place time as dependent upon the primitive sense of motion. “There is an area of our visual system of our brain that is dedicated to the processing of motion.”
MOVING TIME METAPHOR
“There is a lone, stationary observer facing in a fixed direction. There is an indefinite long sequence of objects moving past the observer from front to back. The moving objects are conceptualized as having fronts in their direction of motion.”
The time has long past for that answer. The time has come. Time flies by. Summer is almost past. I can see the face of trouble. I cannot face the future. The following days will tell the story.
In this metaphor I conceptualize time as an object moving toward me. The times that are in front of me are conceptualized as the future and the times that have passed me are the past. The present time is that time that is now beside me. This is why we speak of the here and now. My position is a reference point, thus tomorrow is before me and yesterday is past me. I can see the future and the past is gone forever.
MOVING OBSERVER or TIME’S LANDSCAPE
The second major metaphor for time represents a moving observer wherein the present is the position on the path in which the observer is positioned.
In this metaphor the observer is moving through time. Time is a path that I move through. Time, i.e. the path can be long or short, time can be bounded.
There is trouble ahead. Let’s spread this project over several days. We reached summer already.
In this metaphor we construct temporal correlates with distance measurements: long, short, pass, through, over, down the road, etc.
Quotes from Philosophy in the Flesh by Lakoff and Johnson
Yes, it is. Time is a word, an idea, fabricated by we who perceive it as a means to schedule our lives and measure the passage of existence and it's various changes and routines. It's a human construct, like evil. Just ask Azrael.
__________________ Recently Produced and Distributed Young but High-Ranking Political Figure of Royal Ancestry within the Modern American Town Affectionately Referred To as Bel-Air.
Since we can empirically say that cause always precedes effect I would argue that calling time "abstract" would allow you to deem anything and everything as abstract, thus making the word meaningless.
__________________
Graffiti outside Latin class.
Sed quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
A juvenal prank.
There are at least two kinds of ideas (concepts): concrete and abstract.
The warmth that an infant feels, when being held closely after birth, is a concrete concept. The affection one feels for another is an abstract concept. The warmth that often accompanies that feeling of affection might very well be constructed with the concrete warmth that that infant felt.
We construct abstract concepts from concrete concepts.
An abstract idea (concept) does not exist outside the human "mind", but it is important to keep in mind that everything that we think, know, and perceive exists outside of the human mind only in our projection of it as existing outside of the human mind. That which is outside the human mind exists but we cannot know it with certainty. We tend to think that the objects that we perceive are in fact existing as mind independent reality. But we can only know what we have processed as being "the thing-in-itself".
Objectivity is our shared subjectivity. Abstract concepts are constructed from concrete ideas (concepts). Abstract ideas are often objectified (reified) and treated as objects. We are meaning creating creatures and we constantly create and reify abstract ideas that we will live, die, and kill for. Freedom and time are examples of these reified ideas.
It would be like asking if length is an abstract idea. The units of measurement would be anthropic and relative, but they represent something that exists outside of the human mind.
Gender: Male Location: Dreaming...Or am I living...
I am not going to attempt to engage in all of your points, as I can't spend an hour pouring over your post and then referencing other things,
However I will say a few things.
The concept of metaphor as you presented it seems to be rather flawed. It seems to be mixing how we perceive things and how things actually are into a sort of hyper-logical knowledge that doesn't seem to have come from anywhere. Are metaphors supposed to be different "States of Affairs"? (As described by Wittgenstein) Or a perception of the state of affairs? Both?
However when I googled your author, it seems to be more of a linguistic movement, and a movement away from Western Philosophy. I am not equipped to deal with this yet, so I will not.
Another point regarding time that has been missed would be how time actually exists outside of our perceptions of it.
Does time have what is called a "movable present" where what we view as the "present time" is simply moving through an event of time that actually exists? the simplification of this is to say Does the future exist now? Does the Past? This view would argue that in some form it does.(This can be seen to move against free will, but that is another argument)
Or is the present static? Is the present all that exists and the past and future are only concepts and projections? Do we create the "future" as it happens and is the past, in a sense destroyed?
Another question to consider:
If everything in the universe froze, and stopped moving, would time continue?
Understanding any poem requires knowledge. The following poem is from the Sanskrit tradition:
Neighbor please/ keep an eye on my house/ my husband says the water from the well/ is tasteless/ so even when I’m alone/ I have to go into the forest/ where the Tamala trees/ shade the river bank/ and maybe the thick reeds/ will leave marks on my body.
Comprehending this poem requires the reader to know such things as—passionate sexual activity can leave marks on the body—in India at the time of the poem illicit sexual rendezvous often took place in the tall reeds of the river bank.
Such knowledge would be required to understand a similar poem:
There where the reeds are tall/ is the best place to cross the river/ she told the traveler/ with her eye on him.
Take your average metaphor; it too requires knowledge to comprehend. Your average metaphor has a source domain containing knowledge and a target domain to which that knowledge is mapped.
LIFE AS A JOURNEY is a metaphor describing our knowledge of journeys, which is used to help us comprehend the problem of living in our society. This metaphor helps us comprehend both consciously and primarily unconsciously that there is a correspondence between a traveler and a person engaged in the mundane and also important aspects of living, i.e. the road traveled, the directions taken, the starting point, the destination, etc.
The reason that this form of knowledge is so powerful is because a whole lifetime of learning about journeys can be at our beck and call as we navigate life’s hazards. All of this need not be relearned at each of life’s crossroads. Purposes in life can be understood as destinations.
Similar metaphors that come to our aid:
LIFE IS A BURDEN
LIFE IS DAY
LIFE IS A FIRE
LIFE IS A PLAY
LIFE IS A POSSESSION
We can see that the power to reason about living very largely comes through metaphor and basic schemas. Once we learn a schema we need not relearn it each time we need it. “It becomes conventionalized and as such is used automatically, effortlessly, and even unconsciously…Similarly, once we learn a conceptual metaphor, it too is just there, conventionalized, a ready and powerful conceptual tool…The things most alive in our conceptual system are those things that we use constantly, unconsciously, and automatically.”
Quotes from “More Than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor” by Lakoff and Turner.
What is even more interesting is that there are linguistic metaphors of which we are all familiar and then there are conceptual metaphors. The conceptual metaphor takes place unconsciously. It happens when the conceptual structure of one experience becomes part of the conceptual structure of another experience or of an abstract idea.
Cognitive science, as delineated in “Philosophy in the Flesh” by Lakoff and Johnson, presents a new paradigm for cognitive science. This new paradigm might be called the “conceptual metaphor” paradigm. The theory is that experiences form into concepts and some of these concepts are called “primary metaphors”. These ‘primary metaphors’ are often unconsciously mapped from the originating mental space onto another mental space that is a subjective concept, i.e. abstract concept.
Physical experiences of all kinds lead to conceptual metaphors from which perhaps hundreds of ‘primary metaphors’, which are neural structures resulting from sensorimotor experiences, are created. These primary metaphors provide the ‘seed bed’ for the judgments and subjective experiences in life. “Conceptual metaphor is pervasive in both thought and language.” It is hard to think of a common subjective experience that is not conventionally conceptualized in terms of metaphor.
Metaphors can kill and metaphors can heal. Metaphor can be a neural structure that provides a conscious means for comprehending an unknown and metaphor can be a neural structure that is unconsciously mapped (to be located) from one mental space onto another mental space. There is empirical evidence to justify the hypothesis that the brain will, in many circumstances, copy the neural structure from one mental space onto another mental space.
Linguistic metaphors are learning aids. We constantly communicate our meaning by using linguistic metaphors; we use something already known to communicate the meaning of something unknown. Many metaphors, labeled as primary metaphors by cognitive science, are widespread throughout many languages. These widespread metaphors are not innate; they are learned. “There appear to be at least several hundred such widespread, and perhaps universal, metaphors.”
Primary metaphors have this widespread characteristic because they are products of our common biology. Primary metaphors are embodied; they result from human experience, they “are part of the cognitive unconscious.”
Metaphor is a standard means we have of understanding an unknown by association with a known. When we analyze the metaphor ‘bad is stinky’ we will find that we are making a subjective judgment wherein the olfactory sensation becomes the source of the judgment. ‘This movie stinks’ is a subjective judgment and it is made in this manner because a sensorimotor experience is the structure for making this judgment.
CS is claiming that the neural structure of sensorimotor experience is mapped onto the mental space for another experience that is not sensorimotor but subjective and that this neural mapping becomes part of the subjective concept. The sensorimotor experience serves the role of an axiom for the subjective experience.
Physical experiences of all kinds lead to conceptual metaphors from which perhaps hundreds of ‘primary metaphors’, which are neural structures resulting from sensorimotor experiences, are created. These primary metaphors provide the ‘seed bed’ for the judgments and subjective experiences in life. “Conceptual metaphor is pervasive in both thought and language. It is hard to think of a common subjective experience that is not conventionally conceptualized in terms of metaphor.”
The neural network created by the sensorimotor function when an infant is embraced becomes a segment of the neural network when that infant creates the subjective experience of affection. Thus—affection is warmth.
An infant is born and when embraced for the first time by its mother the infant experiences the sensation of warmth. In succeeding experiences the warmth is felt along with other sensations.
Empirical data verifies that there often happens a conflation of this sensation experience together with the development of a subjective (abstract) concept we can call affection. With each similar experience the infant fortifies both the sensation experience and the affection experience and a little later this conflation aspect ends and the child has these two concepts in different mental spaces.
This conflation leads us to readily recognize the metaphor ‘affection is warmth’.
Cognitive science hypothesizes that conceptual metaphors resulting from conflation emerges in two stages: during the conflation stage two distinct but coactive domains are established that remain separate for only a short while at which time they lose their coactive characteristic and become differentiated into metaphorical source and target.
I find that this ‘conceptual metaphor’ paradigm is a great means for comprehending the human condition. But, like me, you will have to study the matter for a long time before you will be able to make a judgment as to its value. This book “Philosophy in the Flesh” by Lakoff and Johnson, from which I derived these ideas and quotes, is filled with ideas that are new to the reader and thus studying it will require a good bit of perseverance.
Have you ever, before reading this post, thought that the brain unconsciously copies the neural structure from one mental space onto another mental space? Those who find this idea compelling will discover, in this new cognitive science paradigm, a completely new way of thinking about philosophy and human nature.
This new cognitive science paradigm is the best thing to happen to philosophy since Thales! How about them apples?
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Aug 10th, 2009 12:40 PM
